My 4th grade remediated dyslexic ADHD’er starts school tomorrow.
I got her IEP in the mail Saturday. She is in “transition” after making fantastic reading/writing progress in the last two school years. Her remaining issue is spelling. While she moved leaps and bounds in all measures, spelling hasn’t budged a bit in the percentiles.
Part of it is spelling is difficult for her - she remains a phonetic speller. Part of it is also, if she is mastering something new, e.g., writing structure, she is paying so much attention to that, she can’t concentrate on the spelling also. Part of it also is the inconsistency in ADHD and racing through work - slowing down and/or proofreading her work is well, unatural to her.
This was discussed at the committee meeting - the goal is to get her to pay attention to her spelling and self correct or proofread on a regular basis (if her fragile self esteem gets clobbered in the process, I will go crazy). Preferrably, I would think the classroom teacher should “pick and choose” her battles and come up with her own plan. In the hands of the right teacher (which she will have), this could and should happen.
My thought is she may never be a great speller, but she has a shot at being a good speller and should learn to self correct in elementary before possibly the less tolerant middle/high school years. If the effort isn’t made now, it’ll probably remain a problem for her all through school.
Instead, the IEP came back with “X will circle spelling errors and self correct” under the testing modifications section. I think this is wrong in that 1) it puts the entire responsibility on dd should they follow the IEP to the letter (which they will), 2) it will make her feel different compared to the other kids and 3) it shouldn’t be limited to tests only but nor should it have to apply to everything she does either. But, I can’t figure out a way as to how to articulate better goals in writing. Any suggestions??? Please????
The IEP had several major problems like typos, wrong classification, so I’m hoping to help the overworked special ed teacher out by sending them the corrections (with the spelling suggestion too).
If you can help me, THANK-YOU!!!!! Sorry so long. I’m also going to post this under other bulletin boards here.